At the first choice of roads she nearly blundered past the cat, but the spark of gold from its eyes warned her to turn back. After that it became easier: she had only to look for the glow of its eyes to tell her which path to take. It seemed patient, turning back several times during the journey to make certain she was following. She had assumed it would share Oriana’s dislike of her, but now she wondered if it was on her side after all. Or perhaps she had only imagined the queen’s jealousy. She knew that she would never understand these folk, that even Margery did not understand them.
But she had not imagined Brownie’s concern for her. She grinned in the dark, remembering it. She had taught him to care for something; Oriana could not take that away from her. And Arthur had changed too, had become stronger, more certain. She laughed, and Art turned to her in puzzlement. But she could not tell him what she had found so amusing. It had been only that afternoon that Hogg had called her a poor mother, and she had agreed with him. But how many mothers could claim to have called up affection in the stony breasts of the Fair Folk?
She went forward with a lighter step, not minding the strange calls and rustling sounds of the forest around them. And the cat didn’t seem to heed the noises either; it paused only a moment when the howl of the wolf drifted through the trees.
After a time the forest thinned. To her surprise she saw Aldergate ahead, and from there it was only a short walk to Paul’s. She went down Aldergate Street, the stars lighting her path.
A tree stood near the gate to Paul’s. Its branches were thick with fruit of all sort, growing indiscriminately among the leaves—apples and oranges, pears and plums—and the stars’ shone among them, fruit of a different kind. It had to have come from Faerie, she thought, a final sign to mark the place where their country ended and the everyday world began.
She studied it for a long moment. Was this the tree Margery had touched the day they had exchanged Arthur for her son? And did she only see it plain now, or was it hidden under the faeries’ glamour, its true form what Margery had shown her?
Beside her Art stirred with impatience; probably he had become used to miracles. She took one last look and then led him to her house on Paternoster Row.
She was surprised when the cat followed them inside. She built up the fire and sat near the hearth. The cat jumped into her lap and she stroked its smooth fur, getting used to the idea of it. It arched back and looked at her with its rich gold eyes. “Oh, Art,” she said, “how will we manage without Brownie?”
22
King Arthur sat amid the green grass of a field in Faerie. He had gone there to be alone, but now he became aware that some of the winged creatures had followed him. They flew around him in circles and then scattered across the field, singing and laughing. He could not bring himself to tell them to leave.
So few of the creatures had returned from the battle, perhaps only half a dozen. A handful of the horned soldiers had survived, and almost none of the twig-people. Some of the Fair Folk had stayed in the world when the roads had closed, either out of choice or because they could not find the way back.
He remembered how he had felt when he had seen his mother—nay, not his mother but Alice—fight her way across the churchyard toward where he stood with Oriana. Darkness had fallen over the battleground, but when she spoke to him it seemed the darkness in his mind had lifted; he knew who he was and what he had to do. He understood then that all his wandering through the world—through many worlds—had been a prologue to this. All the battles he had fought and all the strange sights he had seen had been necessary to teach him to use his power.
He was, as he had thought, a king: to how many children was it given to realize their childhood fantasy? But with this realization had come a responsibility he had not foreseen. Oriana had not explained it to him because to her it had been obvious; she had been raised as a queen and had never understood that it had been otherwise with him. It had taken Alice, a mortal woman, to show him his task.
Now he looked out over the field and laughed harshly. He had finally taken his place as king over these people, only to find that they had dwindled almost to nothing. After he had fought their battles what was there left for him to do? He could lead the Fair Folk in their revels, perhaps, and sit at the head of the table at their feasts, but nothing more. There had been one last important decision to make, the command to close the roads, but Oriana had taken it upon herself without consulting him.
If she’d asked him, though, he would have said she’d made the right choice. It was true that the Fair Folk needed the people of the world, that they were drawn somehow by their mortality. The people died so early they seemed to shine with life, as if they concentrated hundreds of years in one brief span. But he saw that mortals carried danger with them as well, that within the past few years mortal and immortal had grown far too close. It was possible to lose oneself in serving them. Look at Brownie, pining because he had had to leave Alice. And what had he done in her house, after all, but wash her plates and sweep her hearth! And what of himself? He had felt it too, this pull toward them, as if he could be warmed by the fire of their mortality. Was this love? Was it what Alice had called love?
The winged creatures sang around him. “Change and go, change and go. Twirl your partner, change and go.”
Aye, the creatures were right. He remembered his other life, the long talks in smoky taverns, and he knew that the Fair Folk had lost their place in the world. A new day had come, one in which they would dwindle into legends, stories. He felt happy that he would not be in the world to see it.
He stood and went back to the hill. It had been given to him to preside over the twilight of his people, and he would have to do the best he could. “Change and go,” the creatures sang, circling in flight above him. “Change and go. Twirl your partner, change and go.”
The task of cleaning up the churchyard took longer than the stationers expected. Weeks after what some called the great battle and others a monstrous wind they were still at it, hammering stalls, carting away trash, sorting out the books and ballads scattered all over the yard. The stationers’ fund had been almost exhausted by the repairs, and in the meetings some called for higher dues and charitable donations.
Alice worked side by side with her neighbors in the yard. In the hours left to her in the evenings she tried to take care of her household tasks. It was in those moments that she found herself missing Brownie most of all, wishing that he had come back with her through the maze of roads, and she would stop herself, angrily. His place is in the queen’s court, she would think. Do you imagine he would willingly leave her to be your servant? Then she would sigh, and wipe the dust off her hands, and wish she could teach Art to boil water or wash a dish. What would become of the boy?
During those weeks she barely saw Walter at all, though once or twice she thought he had looked up at her from across the yard. She wanted to talk to him, but always something stopped her. Had he seen her speak to Oriana? What did he think of her? The stationers no longer avoided her but their behavior now was very nearly worse: they treated her with deference, asking her opinion on every question. Perhaps they still thought she was a witch, but if so they seemed to want to be on her side, whatever side that was. But she had no answers to give them; though she might know more than they did about the great battle she felt that she understood very much less.
She did not see Margery at all. There was no question in her mind that Margery was some sort of magician, and that she had used her art to raise the wind and light over the churchyard. Sometimes Alice thought that she might lose her immortal soul if she talked with the woman, but usually she knew that that was not what kept her from her visits.
The truth was that Margery had terrified her. She had thought she had known the other woman well, she’d had a hundred comfortable conversations with her, but what she had seen in the churchyard still made her shiver to think of it. How could she sit in the woman’s crowded house and drink her mulled wine, all the while know
ing she was capable of—of that?
A few months after the battle nearly all the booksellers reopened their stalls. Alice, like her neighbors, had lost most of her books in the destruction of the churchyard, and she was straightening up the sparse piles before her when she saw Tom Nashe turn in at the gate. The sight of him cheered her; perhaps he would say something amusing to lift her spirits.
But he looked different somehow, chastened, his usual wildness gone. “Good day, Mistress Wood,” he said.
She saw that he carried a sheaf of papers under his arm, and she wondered if it could be a manuscript. “Good day,” she said. “Have you been ill?”
“I’ve had—trouble sleeping. There’s a woman—I can see her when I close my eyes. She has long brown hair and berry-blue eyes. Do you think I’ll ever meet her again?”
“Nay, Tom,” Alice said as gently as she could. “The roads to her country are closed now.” She noticed then that the flower he wore pinned to his hat had wilted and turned brown. Poor man, she thought, remembering Brownie. What will he do now?
“I thought as much. Anyway,” he said, looking a little more cheerful, “I have a manuscript for you.”
“Good. I could do with something lighthearted.”
“It’s not very lighthearted, I’m afraid. It’s about London, about the follies of Londoners.”
She took it doubtfully. On almost the first page she saw something she had never expected to see: an apology to Gabriel Harvey. “Nothing is there now so much in my vows as to be at peace with all men, and make submissive amends where I have most displeased … Even of Master Doctor Harvey I heartily desire the like, whose fame and reputation I rashly assailed … Only with his mild gentle moderation hereunto hath he won me.”
She looked up. Tom grinned at her, the old Tom, and for a moment she thought he had written the entire manuscript as a jest. Then he said, “Are you surprised?”
She nodded. “Gabriel Harvey—after all he’s said about you—”
“I’ve done with fighting.”
“Aye,” she said. “I understand that only too well.”
They spoke a little more, and then Tom said he must be going. “Take care, Tom,” she said. She watched him as he left the churchyard. How he had changed; she wouldn’t have believed it unless she’d seen it. An apology to Gabriel Harvey! She shook her head.
She paged through his manuscript, keeping one eye out for customers. But no one came; folks still feared the plague, and people had started to whisper about the strange sights in Paul’s churchyard. She left her stall and began to look through the other stationers’ books, something all the booksellers did two or three times a month.
She was interested to see what had happened to all of George’s books and copyrights. When he hadn’t come back after the final battle his copyrights had been portioned out at the stationers’ meeting. Alice had gotten some of them; most people thought she deserved them.
Now she paged through one of George’s books on another stall and then turned her attention to a book near it, a thick volume bound in black leather. It looked familiar; she thought she might have seen something like it in Margery’s house. She opened it at random and began to read:
“Not all the things the physician must know are taught in the academies. Now and then he must turn to old women, to Tartars who are called gypsies, to itinerant magicians, to elderly country folk and many others who are frequently held in contempt. From them he will gather his knowledge, since these people have more understanding of such things than all the high colleges.”
She closed the book and looked for the author. Paracelsus, the great physician and alchemist. Then she stood a moment, her eyes nearly closed, and thought. If Tom could make his peace with Gabriel Harvey then she could find it within herself to talk to Margery. She went back to her stall, closed it, and walked to Ludgate and Margery’s cottage.
Agnes opened the door to her. “Good day, Alice,” she said calmly, as if Alice made regular visits to the cottage.
“Good day. I came to talk to—ah, there she is.”
Margery turned from where she had been hanging a bunch of herbs by the window. “Alice,” she said, sounding pleased.
Once again, unbidden, there came to Alice’s mind the picture of Margery in the churchyard, the great light that had swept across the yard, her hair streaming backward from the force of it. Could this small dumpy woman have done all that? Now her hair was tangled in a hundred knots; she looked as if she had not combed it since that day.
“Sit down,” Margery said. She rummaged among the confusion on the floor and found her pipe, then came over to join her. “Would you like some wine?”
“I—Nay. Thank you.”
Margery moved a pile of books and manuscripts and sat comfortably on a three-legged stool. “Is something wrong?” she asked, drawing on her pipe.
Now that it came to it Alice was unsure how to begin. Surely it would be uncivil to ask the woman if she was a witch, if she practiced the black arts.
“You want to talk about the battle in the churchyard, and about my part in it,” Margery said.
Of course, Alice thought. She should have remembered the way Margery seemed to read her thoughts. “Aye,” she said, not trusting herself to say anything else.
“I used what I had learned in my studies, nothing more.”
“And what studies were those?”
“Do you still think I consort with the devil, in spite of everything you know about me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. You can’t tell me that those—that what you did came from God.”
“Nay. I told you before, Alice—don’t you remember? I tried to explain. There are more than two kinds of magic.”
“Aye, I remember. And I disbelieved it as much then as I do now.”
“Was Oriana on the side of God or the devil? What about the red king?”
“On—on the devil’s side. Both of them.”
“Nay, you don’t believe that. You fought for Oriana yourself.”
“I did, aye. But I’ve come to believe that my soul may be damned for it. She’s a godless creature, I think. It was wrong of her to take my son away.”
“Wrong? It seems so to you, but these creatures don’t follow your laws. You of all people should know that—you’ve seen them at their revels. And I cannot think of anything for which you might be damned, unless it be a surfeit of kindness.”
“But then—were we right to fight for Oriana?”
Margery drew on her pipe; smoke drifted in the air before her for a moment. Then she looked at her friend shrewdly. “Your mind contains two boxes—right and wrong, good and evil, left and right. And everything you encounter goes into one box or the other.”
Alice could not think what to say. Why would Margery never answer her questions?
“Hogg thought the same thing,” Margery said. “The red king’s people were the children of day, he thought, and Oriana’s folk the children of night. But you’ve seen yourself that the differences are not so clear. The red king commanded creatures made of fire and of water, and so did Oriana. Both can withstand light of the sun and moon.
“But Hogg went beyond that. He persuaded himself that the red king’s people were good, and Oriana’s evil, so that he could continue to do his work. Yet he never found the last alchemical step, the one he sought for so long. Do you know why?”
Alice shook her head. She was not interested in Hogg’s business, but she knew from experience that Margery would continue no matter what she said.
“Who was Arthur’s father?” Margery asked.
“His—father?” Alice said, startled. “I—I don’t know.”
“You do. You know enough about this matter that you can guess the answer.”
“I don’t know. Was it—nay, it couldn’t be—” Margery nodded.
“The red king?” Alice asked, astonished.
“Aye. He and Oriana were married once.”
“But why—”
/>
“They quarreled shortly before Arthur was born. And for years afterward the red king did nothing but feed on his hatred, while Oriana grew cold. What do you know about alchemy?”
Alice shook her head. “Very little.”
“Many books will tell you that the final step consists of the marriage between the red man and the white lady. Folks have interpreted this in different ways—the red man is one substance or another, and the white lady some other substance. They are so used to secrets, to things which are hidden, that they don’t recognize the bare truth when they see it. The red man is the red king, of course, and the white lady is Oriana.”
“And Arthur?”
“Arthur is the fruit of their union. The Philosopher’s Stone.” She grinned at Alice’s expression. “Oh, aye, he can change lead into gold, though he’s only just learned how. You didn’t know that, did you, when you and John raised him.”
Alice said nothing, too amazed to speak. “Hogg never understood that about Arthur,” Margery said. “To him one side was good and the other evil, and so the idea of marriage, of reconciliation, never entered his mind. For all his knowledge, for all his wisdom, he was too blind to see what was before him all the time.”
“What happens now? Now that the red king’s dead?”
“Now the Fair Folk dwindle. The age passes, and their power fades from the world. And my power with it, I’m afraid.”
“Your—”
“Aye. As long as the king and queen were alive there was a balance in the world, and I could use that in my magic. And so could Hogg, though he didn’t understand where his power came from.”
“But you worked for Oriana, against the red king.”
“Aye. But for years before that I worked for reconciliation between them. It was only when I saw my cause was lost that I began to work for Oriana. I feared what the red king might do in his hatred. But I entered her service unwillingly, and I would not have chosen the way things turned out. Too many died in her war, too many good people.”
Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon Page 29